March 28, 2024

Media Decoder Blog: The Breakfast Meeting: A Loss at DreamWorks Animation, and a Cute Interspecies Rescue Was Fake

DreamWorks Animation reported an $82.7 million loss in the fourth quarter after taking an $87 million write-down related to the flop “Rise of the Guardians,” Brooks Barnes reports. DreamWorks shares dropped 1.3 percent in regular trading and less than 1 percent in after-hours trading. Jeffrey Katzenberg, the company’s chief executive, said there would be layoffs of around 350 of the company’s 2,000 employees.

An adorable and widely disseminated YouTube clip that appeared to show a pig rescuing a goat struggling in water was, in fact, carefully staged, Dave Itzkoff reports. The video was shared on Twitter by Time magazine and Ellen DeGeneres; broadcast on NBC’s “Today” show and its “Nightly News” program, ABC’s “Good Morning America” and Fox News. (Brian Williams, anchor of NBC’s “Nightly News,” said “we have no way of knowing it’s real” when the video aired.) The video was staged for “Nathan for You,” a show that will debut on Comedy Central on Thursday. Nathan Fielder, the show’s host, said that the media attention was completely unexpected. “If we were trying to pull an elaborate hoax on the news, I think we could have pushed further,” he said.

Twitter hashtags tied to TV shows saturate many broadcasts, allowing stars and producers instant feedback. Shows are now working to close the feedback loop and incorporate those instant responses on the air, Brian Stelter reports. For instance, “American Idol” will start using Twitter to poll its audience on Wednesday and will incorporate the results into a “fan meter”; the show’s producers hope it will engage younger viewers and encourage people to watch live so that their Tweets are added to real-time results. The most successful way to combine social media and television appears to involve true interactivity rather than “talking to” an audience, said Mark Ghuneim, a co-founder of Trendrr, a company that tracks online chatter about TV shows.

Bounce TV, a network that features programming developed for African-American audiences, is hiring new ad-sales employees and opening a New York office after selling commercial time to blue-chip marketers like General Motors, McDonald’s and Johnson Johnson, Stuart Elliott writes. Bounce TV reaches 77 million American television homes and 86 percent of African-American television homes, Jonathan Katz, its chief operating officer, said. The moves also come after Nielsen began to measure viewership and issue ratings for the network.

ABC News is shoring up its political coverage with a few high-profile hires, Dylan Byers reports on Politico. ABC News’s president, Ben Sherwood, has been courting political reporters from The Washington Post, The New York Times and other outlets to strengthen the network’s Washington bureau after several departures. The network announced the hiring of New York Times political reporters Jeff Zeleny and Susan Saulny this week, which may be an indication that it plans to change the nightly news broadcast’s focus from human interest pieces to more political fare. ABC News’s political coverage already has a strong online presence, through its partnership with Yahoo News, Mr. Byers writes.

Article source: http://mediadecoder.blogs.nytimes.com/2013/02/27/the-breakfast-meeting-a-loss-at-dreamworks-animation-and-a-cute-interspecies-rescue-was-fake/?partner=rss&emc=rss

The TV Watch: ‘The Rosie Show’ and ‘Oprah’s Lifeclass’ on OWN

Rosie O’Donnell’s new talk show, her first since 2002, is shown live and offers a mix of standup comedy, music, dance and one-on-one chats with celebrities about menopause creams and breast reduction. Especially compared with the solemn, mostly repurposed fare that clutters the rest of OWN, “The Rosie Show” is colorful and spontaneous: the funny cousin who shows up for a family ceremony late and lets suitcases of clothes, shoes and presents spill out all across the living room floor.

It’s not perfect television, it’s amusing television, and a reminder of why so many other OWN programs, beautifully shot and expertly produced, seem so dull. Ms.

O’Donnell’s debut on Monday preceded the premiere of another OWN show, “Oprah’s Lifeclass.” These are lectures built around clips of old interviews with the likes of Jim Carrey, J. K. Rowling and Ellen DeGeneres that Ms. Winfrey, seated in an armchair, uses to illustrate an “Aha!” moment.

Mr. Carrey, for example, told Ms. Winfrey in 1997 that he had visualized success and willed it to happen, writing himself a $10 million check as inspiration. Ms. Winfrey this week described Mr. Carrey as one of “our greatest teachers.”

Ms. Winfrey also used her own past as a morality tale, showing her famous weight-loss reveal in 1988, when she dragged a red wagon laden with 67 pounds of fat; on “Lifeclass” she said it illustrated “the false power of ego.” (She didn’t explain why it was any less egotistical to brag about feeling less compelled to lose weight.)

“Oprah’s Lifeclass” is “The Oprah Winfrey Show” with the life sucked out of it. Episodes of that series are also being reshown on OWN. And the best of them reveal all too clearly that her success didn’t spring solely from the New Age-y self-improvement lessons, but from Ms. Winfrey’s spirited interactions with guests and audiences. She wasn’t always so spiritually “mindful.” A lot of the time she was irreverent, bold and even at times shocking.

Ms. O’Donnell isn’t Oprah Winfrey, but she has a friendly rapport with guests like Russell Brand, Wanda Sykes and Roseanne Barr, as well as people in her studio audience, who ask questions that she answers in the style of the old “Carol Burnett Show.” Ms. Burnett is not Ms.

O’Donnell’s only role model. She has often said she wants to recreate the kind of fun, easygoing talk show Mike Douglas and Merv Griffin used to host in the ’60s and ’70s. And like them, Ms. O’Donnell is willing to be silly, be it singing with shirtless male dancers or hosting nutty quiz rounds with celebrity guests.

The celebrity interviews are relaxed and often quite intimate. She and Ms. Sykes discovered that as little girls, they both fantasized about having children, not with a husband, but as single mothers. “I guess that’s what little lesbians tell themselves,” Ms. O’Donnell said.

Ms. O’Donnell always makes a lot of Spanx jokes, but even she seemed a little taken aback by the singer Gloria Estefan, who confided that she wears Spanx with a crotch opening and thus doesn’t need to use paper seat covers in public toilets.

There is a redemptive thread to this talk show as well, which is perhaps a requirement for all OWN programming. Ms. O’Donnell left “The View” in 2007, after only a year as a co-host, in semidisgrace after publicly feuding with Donald Trump and her fellow hosts Barbara Walters and Elisabeth Hasselbeck.

That debacle led to a confessional memoir, “Celebrity Detox,” about her struggles with fame and anger, themes that pop up as self-deprecating jokes in her stand-up comedy.

On the premiere of her show on Monday, Ms. O’Donnell performed a mock cabaret number with her own lyrics to “The Night Chicago Died.” (“Remember my problems on ‘The View’/I told Hasselbeck a thing or two.”)

She also discussed rehab with Mr. Brand, a former drug addict, and breast cancer with Ms. Sykes, who caught hers early and is in full recovery. But serious issues don’t get in the way of what Ms. O’Donnell does best: amiable, free-floating conversation that seems unscripted and unpretentious.

“The Rosie Show” is an OWN program that doesn’t ask viewers to look inside themselves; it just entices them to watch.

Article source: http://feeds.nytimes.com/click.phdo?i=9f58dc157950dfff55b1951a0ffdadc2